The miracle that India is still one seemingly cohesive nation, not teetering on the brink of collapse is a fact that is almost never articulated or debated by the people I know. After all, what are the chances that a nation of 14 official languages, 28 very disparate states and hundreds of factions and pressure groups will surivive as a secular state? Ram Guha, in his exceedingly well-researched new book India After Gandhi , among other things, attempts to answer this question. The obvious danger of composing the recent history of a nation, as Guha says in his foreword, is that for most people reading it, memories of the events described and interpreted are fresh (or at least recallable). This retelling of a living history is far trickier than describing an ancient past that is more-or-less entrenched in public memory as the truth. In his review of the book, Amit Chaudhuri begins with this recent-ancient dichotomy:
It’s in the nature of nations to be addicted to their own histories. Older, pre- national communities, one imagines, occupied themselves with mythology. The secular nation, agog, rehearses its history, the very reasons and outcomes of its existence, to itself. What’s common to both activities is the endless familiarity of the subject-matter to the audience. It’s safe to assume that very few people in a group of devotees listening to, say, the Indian epic Ramayana being read out would not have heard it before. It’s equally prudent to assume that almost all the Indian readers of Ramachandra Guha’s capacious history of democratic India would be familiar with a great deal of the story. What is it, then, that gives myths and national histories their appeal?
Guha also recognizes the dangers of packing in too many anecdotes, given that researching for a history of 60 years ago would provide even the least interpid of historians with tomes and tomes of trivia. To avoid sounding like a blowhard know-it-all or worse still, Guha weaves in trivia as stated fact, as opposed to those tiresome ‘did you know’ references that historians often make.
But the biggest triumph is Guha’s clever ‘what would have been’ propositions. As Chaudhuri puts it: Similarly, a “What if?” animates Guha’s reconstruction of the past 60 years of Indian history. Since 1947, the possibility of disaster has taken the form of certain questions and crises: “What if India were to disintegrate; or to become a totalitarian society; or a military dictatorship; or a Hindu state?” All these are scenarios that appeared plausible, at one time or another, to both the Indian and foreign observer. Guha tells us what happened elegantly, sometimes doggedly: but it’s by constantly implying what might have, while disavowing it with the professional historian’s gesture, that he brings his copious material to life. Guha’s book reminds us of what some other recent studies of India have been getting at, but without this civilised single-mindedness: that it’s not just the story of independence that’s worthy of being counted as one of the great triumphal stories of 20th-century world history; that the survival and perhaps the flourishing of free India counts legitimately as another. Once this fact is acknowledged, its political and cultural consequences, I’m sure Guha will agree, need to be viewed with suspicion.
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